According to Arthur Bliss Lane, appointed as America’s ambassador to Poland in 1944, the inaction by the Red Army during the uprising was a calculated act, to discredit the Polish government-in-exile and, more importantly, to ensure that the Home Army was eviscerated by the Germans so that no effective armed resistance would remain behind after the Germans had been thrown out. The Red Army moved into Warsaw in January 1945, more than three months after the Home Army’s surrender. Meanwhile the Germans, left in occupation, had razed Warsaw to the ground. Every last vestige of a city that had previously been known as the ‘Paris of the North’ was destroyed. The stage was set for subjugation of the ‘liberated’ state.
• • •
The Cold War began with the Polish monitoring of Russian communications in 1944. After the ghastly discovery of the Katyn massacre in 1943, the USSR had broken off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile for the terrible crime of telling the truth about Russia. The Russian threat to Poland became daily more real, as the Soviet Army pushed the Wehrmacht back and itself moved once again into Polish territory. The war on the Eastern Front brought the question of Poland’s borders – or, to be more accurate, the USSR’s expansionist ambitions – back on to the conference table. Winston Churchill moved matches on a table in Tehran to show how lines could be redrawn on maps. Poland was going to move westward, regardless of what actual Poles might think about their homes, families, or control by the Soviets. The eastern border was going to be along the Curzon Line, because the British had invented it and nobody was in a position to stop it.
The Poles at Felden were providing the core of the material relied on by the Polish General Staff and Biffy Dunderdale to try to explain to the politicians – not just of the government-in-exile but also the British and the Americans – what Stalin was really doing. Getting hold of high-quality intercepts of Russian traffic was difficult, but with the liberation of France a new possibility of doing so had opened up and the right person to help with this was conveniently to hand. That person was ‘Colonel Gaudefroy’, formerly Commandant Bertrand, restored in his role as kingpin in the renewed alliance of X, Y, Z and A. He would provide what was needed. There were discussions between X and Z about what the French should monitor and which type of message yielded useful material and, soon enough, the French began to supply Felden with their Russian material.46
Dunderdale had set up a ‘Special Liaison Controllerate’ which was providing reports tagged ‘SBH’ to the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services in Washington. ‘SB’ stood for ‘Secret Broadway’, with ‘Broadway’ meaning the headquarters of MI6 in London. The content gleaned from the airwaves provided colour on the Russians’ operational problems, military establishment, personnel, and more. It complemented broader intelligence from material from broadcasts, newspapers and other sources about the state of affairs in the USSR and the NKVD and its methods.47 It was the culmination of the X-Y-Z-A liaison; but it would take more than the content of SBH reports to convince Y and A to save Poland from the Soviets.
Already there had been plenty of intelligence about Poland, which did not make comforting reading, if anyone had been reading it.
March 3rd [1945]: The bloody Soviet occupation is surpassing the German one in bestiality. There are arrests in every village, murders, raping of girls and pillaging.
March 23rd: The Office of Security … is rounding up former soldiers of the Home Army … they seized about 40 persons in Dobre (50kms. ENE of Warsaw) and vicinity, who were then transported to the camp near Rembertow (outside of Warsaw). The Office of Security is announcing, mendaciously, that arrested Volksdeutsche are in this camp.
May 12th: Round-ups and raids on the population are increasing, while terror and destruction of everything Polish are also growing strength.
May 25th: In the Wodynie district, the corpses of 75 people were discovered while barracks, previously occupied by Soviet forces and the NKVD, were being pulled down. Some of the bodies have been recognised – they were those of the arrested members of the former Home Army from the neighbourhood.48
While such intercepts kept the Poles occupied at Felden, more important, from the perspective of the former team-mates of Équipe Z, was the question of their belongings – both technical and personal – which had been abandoned on the evacuation of the Château des Fouzes. Gustave Bertrand, now shuttling between Britain and France, promised to bring it all over.49 Some archive material was delivered in March, but still the Poles wanted their reverse-engineered Enigma machine and their suitcases full of personal items. So, in April, Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski went to France. Bertrand met them in Paris and handed over the official documents, the Enigma machine and three chests of personal belongings.50 The rest of it was in Cannes:
When Bertrand found out about our intention to travel to Cannes, he became extremely embarrassed and had to admit that he had not paid the rent on the room that was being used to store our cases and that we could therefore have problems in retrieving them. He also warned us that the man had taken advantage of our trust in him and plundered the cases. He was right, because the woman whose house the room was in, after a great deal of persuasion finally gave us the keys to the room. A terrible mess greeted us, cases were slashed, the locks had been forced open, and beyond doubt several items had been stolen and the woollen items had been attacked by moths.51
But Bertrand had been a wonderful host, equipping the duo with a car and smoothing their way through the bureaucracy and paranoia of a country disentangling itself from occupation, self-destructive home rule, and a criss-cross of alien armies. To be sure, there was design as well as goodwill in Bertrand’s bonhomie. Bertrand was planning to rebuild the glorious Équipe Z and he wanted as many of the old team on board as he could get.
• • •
On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker in Berlin. A week later, Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciężki were told to get on a train.52 Fighting was still going on close by; the Red Army was approaching. The train pulled out moments before the Soviets took control of the station. The journey seemed to go on forever. Once again it was a slow flight from a war zone, with secrets that must be kept from the enemy. At Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), however, Langer and Ciężki found the American First Infantry Division. The two Poles were safe.
After a brief (and not entirely harmonious) reunion with Bertrand in Paris, Langer and Ciężki were on their way to London. The war was over. The Nazis were finished. The fact that a Polish team had played its part throughout the war and helped to make major inroads into Enigma-encoded communications was a secret that had been kept safe from the German authorities. They had made a contribution to the Allied victory over Germany and it had been a major one. All that remained to be done was to live happily ever after.
EPILOGUE
POLES APART
Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away?
Hymns Ancient & Modern, No. 537
On Tuesday 27 February 1945, it was the turn of Winston Spencer Churchill to get to his feet in the House of Commons. He had just returned from Yalta, where, along with the dying Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he had ceded control over tracts of Europe to Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, also known as Uncle Joe Stalin, the architect of the nastiest terror, not even excepting that of Nazi Germany, ever seen in Europe. ‘I did not listen,’ wrote John Colville – Churchill’s secretary at Downing Street – in his chronicle. ‘He is trying to persuade himself that all is well, but in his heart I think he is worried about Poland and not convinced of the strength of our moral position.’1
Over 50,000 Polish servicemen were in Britain at the end of World War Two and another 80,000 in various forces across Europe and the Middle East but outside Poland. Airily Churchill offered ‘citizenship and freedom of the British Empire’ to those who considered they could not go home.2
Among the Polish servicemen in Britain were nine cryptologists who were serving at a secret establishment nea
r Hemel Hempstead. On 25 September 1945, they were detailed to attend a Polish school for intelligence officers. Included in the group of nine were Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, Stanisław Szachno and Sylwester Palluth of the old Ekspozytura 300.3 The code-breakers were to become merged into the official army structure, except that the army was no longer going to exist.
Also among the Polish servicemen in Britain were Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciężki, who arrived from Paris at the end of May more dead than alive after their ordeal at the Schloss Eisenberg. Langer and Ciężki immediately petitioned the head of Polish intelligence in London, Stanisław Gano, for arrears of salary.4 Their reception was frosty. Gano had been persuaded that the failure of the escape plans in early 1943 and the capture of Langer, Ciężki, Palluth, Gaca and Fokczyński had been down to ‘hesitation, lack of initiative, almost cowardice’ on the part of Gwido Langer. This poisonous account was hearsay and not based on hard evidence. In the second half of 1945 and again in 1946 Langer devoted weeks to writing up his own account of it all and remained convinced for the rest of his life that Gustave Bertrand had betrayed the team before covering up his own duplicity.
On 6 July 1945, the British government – in interregnum following the general election of the previous day – recognised the Soviet-controlled provisional government of Poland. The government-in-exile, to which Gano owed fealty, instantly became unofficial and irrelevant. By 15 March 1946, the Second Department of the Polish General Staff, which had fed priceless information to Britain and America for years during the conflict, had been disbanded. The remaining Russia-watchers at Felden were closed down a few weeks later.
In early 1946, the idea of a ‘Polish Resettlement Corps’ was proposed by the new Labour government. It was an arrangement to keep Polish servicemen under military discipline and with continuing pay, while they were retrained and ultimately released into regular civilian jobs. Rejewski and the other cryptanalysts were not going to be intelligence officers after all. In fact, there had been no work for them to do since October 1945. A vague idea surfaced that they might be re-employed as cryptologists, doing what they did best, working directly for the ‘clients’ (a reference to Dunderdale and his masters).5 But as Bletchley Park itself was downsizing, this was never more than a pipe-dream.
Langer and Ciężki found themselves in the Polish Resettlement Corps and based in Kinross, in Scotland. The reception given by the Scots to the Polish forces stationed amongst them was warm and welcoming. The Kinross-shire Advertiser reported eagerly on entertainment provided by YMCA ladies to Polish soldiers on 17 January 1945, followed the next day by a Grand Concert in memory of General Sikorski. This was attended by a large audience, even though the temperature was -15°C. In early 1946, there were still dances and entertainments for children where Polish soldiers shared their chocolate rations.6 As a lieutenant colonel, Langer went to live in the Kirkland Hotel in the town. He needed what little Kinross could offer in the way of creature comforts. Ciężki noted, in a letter home, how ‘Gwido … has grown old so much.’
In March 1946, Maksymilian Ciężki had some positive news. Stanisław Gano had not been entirely hostile. Ciężki was awarded the Polish Golden Cross of Merit with Swords.7 The Polish Army had found Ciężki a job, as head of the Signals Learning Centre at the Turfhills Camp in Kinross, helping with the effort to retrain the troops. Better still, his son Henryk made contact. Henryk had enlisted, underage, in General Anders’s army, after getting all the way to Italy after the Warsaw Uprising. The Red Cross had put the two in touch and Henryk would be coming to England later in the year.8
By the spring of 1946, the public mood with respect to the Polish Resettlement Corps was beginning to sour. Britain was bankrupt and the days when Polish fighter pilots had saved the country had been conveniently forgotten. The Polish Army was not represented in the Victory Parade in London which took place on 8 June 1946. Three days afterwards, the Kinross Town Council voted to issue Notices to Quit to Poles living in council houses. Polish soldiers on loan from the Polish Resettlement Corps produced more coal by hand than British miners could with a mechanical cutter and they were taking the jobs of demobilised British servicemen. The Poles should just go home.
The War Office was wringing its hands: ‘we are … faced with the problem of resettling either in the United Kingdom or by emigration overseas, this large mass of some 17,000 officers … these officers are the intelligentsia of Poland.’9
But when it came to the practicalities, they were as you might expect from an army:10
1. The benefits for officers whose commissions are terminated … will be as in the following paragraphs.
2. Cash grant of 56 days’ pay and allowances in lieu of leave …
3. Issue of Civilian Clothing … The scale of issue to a military officer will be as follows provided the officer has completed six months’ service on full pay with the Polish Armed Forces under British Command and has not previously received from either Polish Military, Naval or Civil Sources a civilian outfit or a grant towards the cost of civilian clothes.
Jacket
1
Trousers
1
} or suit as available
Cap or hat
1
Shirt
1
Collars
2
Tie
1
Studs
2
Cuff links, pairs
1
Langer and Ciężki might debate whether they had served under British Command; it is not recorded if they were issued with cufflinks or, if so, with what rapture they received them.
Ciężki’s reunion with his son Henryk should have been a time for celebration. Maksymilian had also been searching vainly for his older sons, Zdzisław and Zbigniew, and Henryk should have news of them. He did. But his mother had placed Henryk under the strictest duty of silence. On no account was anyone other than Bolesława to break the news of their deaths to Maksymilian. And aged only 17, Henryk found this as tough an assignment as anything he’d faced. Avoiding the subject of his brothers, the two discussed Maksymilian’s plan to return home. But by Christmas 1946, Maksymilian Ciężki had come to recognise that to go back to Poland was out of the question. There was no prospect of a job in the armed forces of a Communist country with a CV like his.
What was happening at home, once known only to a few, was now general knowledge and unpleasantly clear. If you were associated with the pre-war and wartime forces of Poland, you were at risk – none more so than those who had been involved in gathering intelligence on the ill deeds of Poland’s neighbours. There was no place to hide in the new version of Poland, which had been reshaped to Stalin’s design. General Anders – who, after all, had been imprisoned in the USSR until Stalin allowed Polish prisoners of war to reform as an army under him – was stripped of his Polish citizenship in 1946, along with seventy-five other senior officers located overseas.11 That was a plain text message clear enough to read. For a former code-breaker to live in Poland and give any hint of what he had been doing, namely spying on Stalin, now the patron of Poland, might well be terminal and the code-breaker’s family was likely to be persecuted or executed.
Not wanting to talk about his role in intelligence work, Maksymilian Ciężki could not explain to his son why he was staying in Scotland. The secrets went in both directions; the gulf between father and son was appallingly wide.
• • •
Marian Rejewski, on the other hand, wanted to go home. He was the least likely of the Polish code-breakers to take up a life of lies, raw courage and guile. But Poland was where Irena and the two children were, as well as a chance to pick up the shreds of his academic career. To go back, he would have to carry out the greatest undercover operation of his life. He would grey out his CV and disappear.
Henryk Zygalski had been friends with Marian Rejewski since they attended the Poznań course on cryptology together seventeen years before. They had so much shared experience, muc
h of it life-threatening: the train out of Warsaw in 1939; robbery in the Pyrenees; imprisonment in Spain …. And they had shared too moments of exhilaration, such as the Enigma breakthroughs and evading the Gestapo. Grey, post-war, rationed Britain was no place to stay. Zygalski understood that. But to return to Poland was madness. Words were exchanged. For Rejewski, family was back home and he would go. For Zygalski, home was where the heart was and the heart was firmly in Britain.
In early 1944, Henryk Zygalski had met a girl in Boxmoor. Like Henryk, Bertha Blofield was musical and they’d been to a symphony orchestra concert together in Watford at the end of January. Within two weeks, Henryk had started taking English lessons. By May, Henryk was out cycling with Bertha through the woods of Ashridge, not far from the workplace at Felden. In July, they were dining together at the White Horse at Boxmoor, with ‘exquisite wine and Drambuie’. Bertha was not just the lastest on the long list of Zygalski’s fun flirtations. With her he was serious.12
Henryk Zygalski was faced with a puzzle, one far harder than the Enigma. His desire to make a life with Bertha was overpowering. But Bertha was married, to a serving RAF officer. Marian Rejewski couldn’t see how to solve that puzzle either, so the debate about returning home developed a sharper, more personal edge.
What a big piece of news – Rejewski going back [wrote Bertha to Henryk on 5 October 1946]. Major [Michałowski] said he knew the Russian instructions for dealing with espionage agents when they could get hold of them.
Of course, M. does not know there is any cloud between you and R. [she continued, on the 10th] – unless you told him. I let him know, in confidence, that you thought R. was going to Poland … He thinks R. may be all right, but that any of you seeking to go to Poland might end the journey in Moscow …13
X, Y & Z Page 26
